Adventure, Food, & Politics Around the World

Leaving America III: Dislodging from the Machine

As a working person in the United States, the tax dollars siphoned from my labor has been used mainly to bolster our military and kill people abroad, both innocent and guilty.

Others uses of our tax dollars include bank bailouts and subsidies offered to financial institutions like Merrill Lynch in the former and Amazon in the latter. For a while now this has genuinely weighed on my conscious. Furthermore, the high taxes of California have failed to fix our broken streets or shelter homeless people in the tent cities along them.

Now I will leave it behind. I will go to Slovenia, a country with a far smaller impact, but my citizenship, and the inescapable impact of America’s prosperity on the less fortunate, will remain.

When Donald Trump was elected, many liberals lamented their disappointment with phrases like, “There is always Canada.” Few have left, and even fewer will ever. It is woven into the fabric of our country to stay. Our land is vast, and there is much of it to cross. There are so many places to go and things to see. Few will ever leave the country at all, and even less will become expatriates in another.

I never said I was leaving because of Trump. I would never give him that credit or satisfaction. I planned the move to Slovenia for my studies even before his candidacy was announced, then dismissed. Though he has not the reason I depart, I would be lying if I said it wasn’t a factor. He is a representation of what I loathe about America. He is a culmination of the things that led to America becoming the fascinating, prosperous mess that it is. There is so much good here, so much freedom. But for now I want something different. But I will always be called back to this fucked up land, I only hope that it will shine from sea to sea the way we always intended.